The Potter Twins and the Order of the Phoenix {5}

24. St Mungo's

"I don't want to wake it up, I don't want to wake it up, the devil in me" ~ Devil in Me, Halsey

I am so relieved when McGonagall says she believes us that I do not hesitate; although shaky and in pain, I stand up and watch as Harry pulls on his dressing gown and glasses, looking around the dormitory that isn't mine. Looking timid, Riley hands me his own dressing gown with a weak smile. 

"Weasley, you ought to come, too," McGonagall says. 

We follow Professor McGonagall past the silent figures of Hermione, Riley, Tay, Seamus, and Dean, out of the dormitory down the spiral stairs into the common room, and out of the portrait hole. But I feel like the panic inside me is going to spill out at any moment; I want to run to Dumbledore, Mr Weasley is bleeding out as we walk slowly along the corridor. What if the fangs were poisonous; my fangs, or rather our fangs...

"Fizzing Whizzbee," McGonagall says as we reach the griffin statue marking the entrance to Dumbledore's office. 

The gargoyle springs to life and leaps aside; the wall behind it splits in two to reveal a stone staircase that is moving continually upwards like a spiral escalator. The four of us step on to the moving stairs; the wall closes behind us with a thud and we're suddenly moving upwards in tight circles until we reach the highly polished oak door with the brass knocker shaped like a griffin.

Though it is now well past midnight there are voices coming from inside the room, a positive babble of them. It sounds as though Dumbledore is entertaining at least a dozen people.

Professor McGonagall raps three times with the Griffin knocker and the voices cease abruptly as though someone has switched them all off. The door opens of its own accord and Professor McGonagall leads Harry, Ron, and I inside. 

The room s in half-darkness; the strange silver instruments standing on tables are silent and still rather than whirring and emitting puffs of smoke as they usually do; the portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses covering the walls are all snoozing in their frames. Behind the door, a magnificent red and gold bird the size of a swan sleeps on its perch with its head under its wing.

"Oh, it's you, Professor McGonagall ... and ... ah."

Dumbledore is sitting in a high-backed chair behind his desk; he leans forward into the pool of candlelight illuminating the papers laid out before him. He is wearing a magnificently embroidered purple and gold dressing gown over a snowy white nightshirt, but seemed wide-awake, his penetrating light blue eyes fixed intently upon Professor McGonagall.

"Professor Dumbledore, the Potters have had a ... well, a nightmare," McGonagall says. "They say ..."

"It wasn't a nightmare," Harry says quickly

Professor McGonagall looks round at us, frowning slightly.

"Very well, then, Potters, you tell the Headmaster about it."

"I ... well, we were asleep ...in separate dormitories," Harry says, and even in my terror and my desperation to make Dumbledore understand, I feel slightly irritated that the Headmaster is not looking at us, but examining his own interlocked fingers. "But it wasn't an ordinary dream ... it was real...I - we saw it happen..." He takes a deep breath, "Ron's dad--Mr. Weasley--has been attacked by a giant snake."

The words seem to reverberate in the air after he has said them, sounding slightly ridiculous, even comic. There is a pause in which Dumbledore leans back and stared meditatively at the ceiling. Ron looks from us to Dumbledore, white-faced and shocked.

"How did you see this?" Dumbledore asks quietly, still not looking at us.

"Well ... I don't know," I say, my temper flaring alongside the panic--what does it matter? "Inside our heads, I suppose-- we've had the same dream before - "

"You misunderstand me," says Dumbledore, still in the same calm tone. "I mean ... can you remember--er--where you were positioned as you watched this attack happen? Were you perhaps standing beside the victim, or else looking down on the scene from above?"

This is such a curious question that my heart leaps; it is almost as though he knows...

"I was the snake," we say in unison, looking at each other with a pained expression. "I saw it all from the snake's point of view."

Nobody else speaks for a moment, then Dumbledore, now looking at Ron who is still whey-faced, asks in a new and sharper voice, "Is Arthur seriously injured?"

"Yes," Harry says emphatically--why are they all so slow on the uptake, do they not realise how much a person bled when fangs that long pierced their side? And why can Dumbledore not do us the courtesy of looking at us?